Vertigo
by provocative envy
Summary: ONE-SHOT: He was charmed by her ignorance, liked to sprawl out in their bed—wherever they were, Bolivia, Beijing, Brisbane—and run his fingers down the ridges of her spine, lecture her about warlocks and incubi and werewolves—his knowledge was clinical, irrefutably scientific, and she could never quite decide if she was entranced or entrenched. Captivated or simply captive. HG/TR.


**Vertigo**

_By: Provocative Envy_

###

_**(Athens, Greece)**_

His name is Tom Riddle.

He is a twenty-eight year old anthropologist from Cambridge.

"I was studying the relationship between rural, old-world polytheistic communities and mythical creatures when I got caught," he tells her, biting into a crisp green apple. Moisture clings to his upper lip, candy pink and sticky. "As I'm sure you're aware, the tribes in the White Mountains have a remarkably unique set of beliefs in regards to caves—they view them as mouths to the underworld—portals, almost—and any and all beasts that dwell within as…abominations.

"Supposedly, a millennia ago, one of their warrior princes was killed and subsequently devoured by something that they only ever referred to as 'the serpent king'—typical surrealist folklore, hardly original, but one of the women in the village mentioned to me that this creature could 'slay with its eyes, but only on its master's orders'—there were conflicting accounts about who the master was—and what he represented—and in a culture that relies so heavily on oral storytelling, well…I was _intrigued_ by the discrepancy, I suppose."

Her grip tightens on a fork-tipped cheese knife. She blinks rapidly.

"Got caught," she repeats. She feels dazed.

He cocks an eyebrow—dark and slender and perfectly shaped, of course, _of course_—and prods at the square beige buttons on the bedside telephone.

"Mm," he hums, picking up the heavy plastic receiver. The dial tone is over-loud and abrasive. "By the basilisk. I had a theory that its eyes wouldn't be deadly if there wasn't any direct contact—and I was right, I suppose, but it still managed to paralyze me, even through the mirror."

The room service tray digs into the point of her elbow.

###

_**(Bran, Romania)**_

Vampires exist.

"I've met several," Tom says, shrugging. "They live in groups of eight or ten or twelve—it's always an even number, they're pathological about it—and designate territory based on the population density of desirable humans. Adolescents taste better than adults, for example—something about the influx of new hormones—and so the areas surrounding schools and colleges are often fought over. They're a fascinating species."

They're searching for a coin—silver, medieval, _ancient_—that had once belonged to Vlad the Impaler. Tom had said it was valuable, powerful, practically a religious icon for vampires—she had asked why that mattered, and he had laughingly dropped a kiss onto her forehead.

"Things have a tendency to be easier when you have vampires on your side," he had said.

She scuffs the toe of her boot against the worn-smooth cobblestones in the castle courtyard; the sun is setting, watercolor blankets of pink and red and orange falling across the sky, and she is nervous.

She is _excited_.

Tom had changed her life. He had shown her a world beyond the tiny, self-contained bubble that was academia—supernatural entities that were not just metaphors for sex and subtext, but real, _real_, alive and undead and unbelievable. He kept journals filled with facts and notes and drawings, observations and detailed transcriptions of interviews, conversations, dreams—he noticed everything, made connections and correlations and was always three steps ahead of her, _always_; he was seemingly charmed by her ignorance, liked to sprawl out in their bed—wherever they were, Bolivia, Beijing, Brisbane—and run his fingers down the ridges of her spine, lecture her about warlocks and incubi and werewolves—his knowledge was clinical, irrefutably scientific, and she could never quite decide if she was entranced or entrenched.

Captivated or simply _captive_.

###

_**(Athens, Greece)**_

"The basilisk paralyzed you," she echoes, watching warily as he sits down on the single, freshly-made double bed and bounces, mattress springs squeaking.

"What year is it?" he asks.

Her gut clenches; because she had put the pieces of this puzzle together already, had catalogued his silent, thin-lipped confusion in the taxi, his quick, almost-guilty expression when he stared at her legs, bare and lightly tanned—she had _realized_, but she had not wanted to _know_.

"What year do you think it is?" she deflects, tracing the glazed porcelain rim of a bowl of large, purple-brown olives.

He stands up, stalks towards her, stops next to the flimsy, mahogany-veneered desk and leans down—

###

_**(Reykjavic, Iceland)**_

"You were in that cave for almost a hundred years," she says, yanking on a pair of sleek, slim-fitting khaki trousers.

"Yes," he replies, grinning lazily as he tosses her a shirt—a tailored white button-down, nipped in at the waist. "Ninety-nine, to be exact."

She fastens the clasp of her necklace, jostles the gleaming gold runic pendants; they had been blessed by a Norse druid, protection charms woven through like shimmering silken threads in a tapestry.

"What woke you up? I asked you before, and you didn't answer."

He chuckles, sits up, tugs at her hand and propels her onto his lap—he rests his chin on her shoulder, brushes his lips against the column of her throat, wraps his arm across her thighs.

"True love's kiss, obviously," he drawls, nipping at her ear.

She relaxes against his chest, arches her neck, makes sure that he can't see the corners of her mouth pinch into a thoughtful, skeptical frown.

"Or is there a better question?" she muses, gently rolling her hips when she feels him pause. "Maybe—not what woke you up, but what put you to sleep in the first place?"

He toys with the zipper on her trousers.

"Maybe," he hedges, fingernail grazing the outer seam of her knickers—plain black cotton, faintly damp at the center. "How much time do we have until the meeting with the elves?"

She grits her teeth, swings her legs around so that she's straddling him, his thumb trapped against the front of her underwear.

"Not enough," she replies, biting back a gasp as he grinds his pelvis up. "Unfortunately."

He narrows his eyes.

She smirks.

He surges forward.

###

_**(Custer, South Dakota)**_

They're tracking a small group of nomadic giants through the Black Hills when she begins to sense a pattern.

Alliances.

Artifacts.

_Control._

She thinks about the encyclopedia he's allegedly writing, the evidence he's gathered and the secrets he's kept—

The siren in Capri whose song he had escaped after filtering the sound through a conch shell. The goblin contract he had twisted and manipulated and schemed his way out of with a sprinkle of copper coated fairy dust; _an obscure loophole_, he had told her smugly. There was the Yeti he had befriended after dispatching a family of wendigos—_fire is their only weakness_, he had murmured, swiping a cheap paper matchbook from the Austrian restaurant—and the Scottish coven of witches he had traded a boomslang-skin book for the amulet that would get them into the City of the Dead.

Tom was clever and crafty and brilliant, almost omnipotent, _omniscient_—he wouldn't settle for scholarship, not when he could do so much.

Not when he could _win _so often.

###

_**(Aktau, Kazakhstan)**_

"Are you ever going to try and find the basilisk again?" she asks, flexing her ankles as they sit on the craggy razor's edge of a cliff overlooking the Caspian Sea. Her white linen skirt is stiff from the salty breeze, and he's stripped off his t-shirt, thin blue cotton bunched into a ball on top of their sandals.

"We," he corrects absently.

"What?"

He scratches at the fine trail of black hair leading into his shorts, abdominal muscles jumping.

"Are _we _ever going to try and find the basilisk again," he says, squinting at a lone grey seagull circling the cove below.

She quirks her lips.

"Optimistic."

The seagull shrieks and dives, a spinning soaring dead weight torpedoing into the crystalline water.

"No," he retorts, shrewd and sharp and casual. "It's more…now that you know that the monsters are real—that all of this is out there, waiting, _watching_—how could you ever go back to being _normal_? To digging holes in the sand, and wading through piles of dirt, and all for what—a broken bit of pottery?"

She stares out at the ocean; the seagull is floating up again, goldenrod beak hanging open and empty.

"We should get to the griffin's nest before it gets dark," she finally says. "I read that they like to trick intruders—I'd hate to trip and fall into one of their traps."

###

_**(Athens, Greece)**_

"I am sympathetic to the forced, rather _rushed_ reorganization of your worldview, Miss Granger," he hisses into her ear, breath warm and sweet as it coils around stray strands of her hair. "I am. But much of my work was incredibly time-sensitive—"

"What kind of work would an _anthropologist _be doing that was 'incredibly time-sensitive'?" she interrupts, meeting his eyes for the first time since he'd woken up—and she feels a thrill of fear, like she's challenging a lion, a shark, something big and aggressive and so much more vicious than she could ever imagine. She doesn't allow herself the luxury of looking away. "And what made you so sure that this—this _basilisk_ was actually real? Real enough that you were _prepared _for an encounter with it?"

He studies her with meticulous efficiency; as if she is a particularly rare breed of insect and he has her wings draped back, pinned to a burlap canvas board—

###

_**(Schaan, Liechtenstein)**_

"There's going to be a war," he tells her as they trudge through the forest on the outskirts of the city.

She's holding a hunting rifle, has a canister of aconite bullets stashed in her satchel—the moon is full and bright, a pockmarked silver omen casting the shadows of the trees in a ghastly, ghostly halo; the leaves on the ground are dry and frail, curled up like swathes of dead snakeskin, peeled and scaled and forgotten.

"A supernatural war," she guesses, palms sweat-slick against the trigger of her gun. "You're going to expose the existence of…all of them, and you're preparing for the backlash."

He halts next to an enormous log, bark brown and brittle like untreated leather.

"I'm _protecting _them," he insists, voice low. "They would have been discovered eventually, and then they would have been captured and experimented on and—and _exploited_. At least with my help they have a fighting chance."

"And what do _you_ get out of that?" she asks, curious and exhausted and _sad_.

He crosses his arms over his torso.

He does not respond.

In the distance, a mournful howl reverberates through the forest.

###

_**(London, England)**_

They're on the lawn of Tower Green, combing the space around the mock, modern scaffold for clues about a clan of ghouls.

"I have something for you," he says, chewing on the inside of his mouth.

She snorts, amused.

"You mean you bought me a present?"

"I didn't buy it," he replies, tapping his fingers against the back pocket of his corduroy trousers. "It's a…family heirloom. Very old. Very valuable. Very—significant. To me."

###

_**(The White Mountains, Crete)**_

The locals had told her stories about the cave.

Cautionary, far-fetched fairytales, legends and fables—Hermione had heard them all before, all around the world, in different languages and accents and voices; because superstition was a universal sort of fear, often distorted by cultural norms and societal dialects, yes, but ultimately always _the same_: a warning, a monster, a savior.

She had not taken any of them seriously.

She thinks, though, as she gapes at the stranger's body—bathed in the fluorescent, sunflower-yellow of her flashlight, frozen, stiff, _pale_—that she should have listened more carefully.

He is young. He is handsome. His clothing is pristine and peculiarly well-made; an all-black suit, neatly pressed and unsullied by the murky melting water dripping off the tapered ends of the overhead rocks—stalagmites, jutting from the interior of the cave like pushpins, jagged and glistening. His right hand is curled into a fist, clutched around a small silver mirror; a piece of paper, dingy with age, is tucked into the frame.

She reaches out, ignoring the way her entire skeleton seems to rattle and tremble and _quake_ in the preternatural stillness of the cave, and she touches the man's wrist.

His skin is—

Warm. It is warm.

His breathing is shallow and sparse, _slow_, and she considers and dismisses a hundred separate theories about what the _hell _is going on—_magic, magic, she does not believe in it, she is not crazy, she is not imagining this, she is sane and this is real and there is an __**explanation**_—and she focuses on unfolding his fingers from around the handle of the mirror.

She inspects it curiously. It is an antique, the ornate silver backing tarnished with harsh black smudges; her reflection is foggy in the slightly warped glass, braided hair mussed and paintbrush streaks of dirt smeared across her cheeks.

The scrap of paper wedged into the bottom of the frame has been torn out of a book—the number '99' is printed on the top right corner—but the rest is mostly blank. There is only one word typed on the page.

_Basilisk_, she reads, brow furrowed.

She glances around the cave, scalp prickling, tongue glued to the roof of her mouth—

She returns her gaze to the man's face.

His eyes are open.

"Don't scream," he says hoarsely.

###

_**(Athens, Greece)**_

"Do you really want to know?" he asks, shifting his shoulders—he was no longer looming, no, no longer _invading_—he was teasing, testing, posture soft, demeanor open, unthreatening and unguarded, the heat of his skin and the dimple of his smile unfailingly _intimate_—

_No_, she thinks suddenly, sure and swift. _I do not want to know._

"Yes," she hears herself whisper.

###


End file.
